I got obsessed with a daily game for a bit

I'm currently on a train from Berlin to Hamburg. In Berlin, I attended the SUMO Conference 2026, where I learned that SUMO seems to be a legitimately cool piece of software that only a handful of people know how to use fully, and where I surprisingly found a simulation project using some spaghetti code me and two friends coded around 2019.

Anyway, I wanted to share someone else's game that kept me busy for a few weeks. Like many other people in my clique, I often get obsessed with something for a while, and spend a lot of time focusing intensively on it.

In this case, I want to write about the wonderful daily game Clues By Sam. It's a daily puzzle where you need to find criminals and innocents with logic deductions. In a way, it feels similar to minesweeper. I'll let you discover it on your own.

I believe a colleague at my previous company shared it in the company chat. Since then, I bought and completed the Puzzle Pack #2, and played it daily for probably about 2 months.

But one thing bothered me. It's on a screen. I always wish (and very often fail) to do my hobbies without my computer/phone. And so, with some magic help from a magic "language model", I parsed all information sent from the browser for the puzzle, and created a pdf that you could print double sided, where each card's true identity and hint can be revealed by flipping it. You also get another page showing you the right order for flipping cards (or "hints").

It took a few iterations, because rows and colums were indexed from the wrong index, but eventually I got it to work. I also made a small website that can archive all previous puzzles and return the PDF. Here is a photo I took of a preliminary result (bonus points if you can guess where it was taken), as well as the website.

I don't think I will be releasing the code for this, as I'm not sure the authors would necessarily be happy about it. The website does say to "not redistribute". But feel free to contact me if you're interested.

I unfortunately have not played this paper version much. It's a bit of a hassle to print and cut it, and I honestly lost interest in the game after a while. And living in Freiburg has allowed me to spend a lot of my free time outside. I joined many run clubs, went orienteering for the first time in my life (and got bitten by a tick with Lyme's disease that took me to the ER), and accompanied Max on a 160km bike ride/rollerskating tour (and got a really bad sunburn from it).

I wish you peace and serenity, Fabio